Report: How should we tackle our field’s biggest barriers to success?

NCDD has completed a report on the October 2014 engagement project focused on addressing barriers in our field. This project was launched on the second day of the 2014 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, where during a plenary session our 415 attendees launched discussions about four barriers to the dialogue and deliberation community’s success:

How might we overcome the lack of trust in our Democracy, our leaders, and in one another?

How might we make our D&D work more equitable, inclusive and empowering?

How might we more clearly delineate our field of practice for ourselves and those we seek to serve?

How might we eliminate structural barriers in our democratic systems?

The results of this engagement project give us valuable insight into the ideas and actions that resonate most with the dialogue and deliberation community. This data can help NCDD and others devise clearer paths forward in our attempts to overcome our field’s greatest challenges.

The four barrier “areas” were identified by looking through the results of an earlier engagement project we ran on Codigital.com that was focused on the question “What do you want to see happen when our field comes together at NCDD 2014?”

Conference attendees were encouraged to discuss these barriers to effective dialogue and deliberation work, and to identify new and existing strategies for overcoming them. We asked a note taker from each table to enter the top three “leading edge solutions” from their group under the relevant barriers on new pages we created on Codigital.

The day after the conference concluded, an email invitation was sent to all conference attendees as well as all members of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation — whether they attended the conference or not — inviting them to Codigital to identify existing strategies and co-create new strategies for overcoming persistent barriers to effective dialogue and deliberation work. Users were invited to add new ideas, vote on ideas to prioritize them, suggest edits to the ideas, and vote to resolve edits as a group.

Thank you to James Carr for donating his time and software to NCDD once again. Codigital is a dream to work in, and we really appreciate James’ generous support. James can be reached at james@codigital.com.